More Blender/Hitfilm harmony

Just recently got a Phantom Pro drone and decided to see what I could come up with. I did however forget to re-calibrate the gimble so it is a bit skewed but did give it a unique perspective. The camera solve, space rock, and crater were all done in Blender 2.78. Then I exported the empties from the camera solve into Hitfilm and that is where I did everything else.

Comments

@Keegan Thanks alot man, yeah I just kind of threw the coloring around a bit. Knew it was far from finished but color adjustments on a lower end laptop with a standard display quality isn't really a good thing. I had another rendering going on the main desktop so I just figured I would play around with that drone footage and an older meteor type impact hole I did with a Phantom 3 Drone and ended up with that.

@FlyingBanana78 Your tracking is exceptional here and it's locked way better than I can do. But I think the hole would look more realistic if the edges weren't so smooth and clearly defined. I would expect a meteor crash would have impact debris thrown up around the edges and be less regular around it. But that may not suit the shot you are trying for so ignore that if it is.

@tddavis&nbsp; yeah I was quite pleased with the track Blender got me, despite it being above a 1 (1.23) There is quite a bit I would like to add but at the time I had a render going on my main desktop PC so in boredom I figured I would tinker around a bit on my laptop and pull a track from blender and stuff it into hitfilm and as usual I crashed the laptop a couple times trying to get more out of it. I will probably mess around with it some more in the next couple days when I get the time. Thanks for the input. And just FYI I realized that I didn't have the smooth shading on (smacks forehead). I might go back into Blender and adjust the crater shape a little more and add some pulsing emission light to the rock.

@Triem23 yeah I will probably play around some with it tomorrow and see what I can get done. I have access to the desktop again so I will be able to add and do things that this laptop wont let me Thanks for the input, always appreciated and great guest spot on scopes btw.

@Yeremyah Yeah that quality is actually been downsized it does do 4k but being that I have no 4k capable devices other than my desktop pc I don't typically record in 4k. That footage was done in just 1080p 60fps the drone is a DJI Phantom 3 Professional

Additional blender project, my main goal with this was to try and get the ocean surface to interact with the fighter on collision. The impact worked but now just trying to figure out if I can create an actual splash at moment of impact using the collision or if I will have to use some stock footage to try and match up with it. Once that is figured out then it will be into Hitfilm for some additional tweaking for some additional effects.

@TriFlixFilms Thank you *chuckles* I am far from tutorial quality and knowledge. But I appreciate the positive feedback. I have just a couple simple tutorials I did and most all of them without sound. I am just a hobbyist that likes to tinker and learn what I can before I can't any more.

@FlyingBanana78&nbsp; Love the look! This will be a neat shot. You might slow your rolling ripples down a little. They look a little fast for the scale.

For the splash down, you could create a plane as an emitter to represent the ocean surface. Then have the particles spawned before frame zero and not to emit after. Use another plane layer (or series of planes) parented to the ship that will collide with the particles.

The real trick will be to have enough particles of various sizes and using the right texture to simulate splash and foam. It will probably take several emitters to achieve, but it is doable.

But comping in the real thing is an option if you can find something of the right scale and angle. The plus side to doing it with a particle system, is once you've achieved the proper look, you are free to render the same shot from multiple camera angles.

I'm no Blender guru. Can Blender's particle sim use video textures? I think the solution will end up being a combination of stock footage for the "real water" look particles strive to match with a particle sim to get the full 3D positioning and some interaction with the model and water surface.

Ok I got the fluid splash working somewhat, Involved an additional fluid sim under the ocean simulation and a collision fluid modifier added to the fighter. Resolution is a bit low but with a single MSI GTX 1070 it would take a day or so considering the particle effect of the smoke on the fighter, the fluid sim, ocean sim and I also dropped the volumetric mist as well. Right now it is rendering out the animation at about 1 1/2 minutes a frame and it is 250 frames in length. But the splash particles are there and I did slow down the ocean movement. Once rendered I will post the results here.

@Stargazer54 yeah I save like crazy especially in Blender as it is a great "free" tool but has it's issues so I know there is nothing worse than getting into it heavy and not saving after doing hours of work on the project to have it just shutdown on you. Hitfilm I don't have the shutdown issues unless I am using my laptop and pushing it beyond it's limits. I have about 5 versions of that Tie fighter LOL so yeah I always have a save point to go back to. I am working on some aliens and attaching a .bvh file to them in blender to have them walking around and doing various things around the meteor crater then going to bake it into an alembic file and put them into Hitfilm for that project.

Thought I'd use the thread to let everyone that might not have seen the new tutorial posted today by Hitfilm about using 3D models in Hitfilm. They have a rigged and animated AT AT for download. It is awesome!!! I haven't had a chance to follow the tutorial yet only open the model in Blender and hit play. Thanks to the guys at Hitfilm!!

Well it has been a while and since my lonely little laptop can't run hitfilm anymore I haven't been messing with it much anymore. I do now have a newer laptop that is capable of running HitfilmPro so I did some more Blender/Hitfilm learning and decided to see if I could create a rusty old barrel and it wouldn't be just a barrel without a fire to stay warm. (The fire is moving quite slow but that was cause it was the only asset I had without dragging all my files from my old laptop onto the new one) But here it is.

First off, I didn't see your earlier samples until now, and was kinda hoping that the new post would be an update of one or both of those. You had some really good stuff going. Any chance those older projects will be resurrected?

Re: the barrel fire, it's a good start. As you say, the fire's a little slow, but the speed is (I'm assuming) an easy tweak. It could probably use some more contrast to the flames as well, and more displacement/distortion. However, unless you really want to spend a lot of time getting a good fire sim, you might consider using stock footage. If you've got a budget, clips from ActionVFX are very affordable. If not, there are some nice free elements at ProductionCrate. Even if you stick with the sim, the elements from those sites would be good reference as you roll your own.

The barrel is a good start as well. You've got the placement and perspective pretty much nailed. The rusty patches are great, and help to break up the texture nicely, but the base red color feels a bit too saturated, and maybe just a little too bright. I also suggest darkening the barrel interior a good deal so that it feels like the fire has tarnished that inside surface. Lighting-wise (or more accurately shadow-wise), it needs a fake shadow overlapping your legs to match the others in the scene. This could be tricky, especially as you move into place at the head of the shot, but it would go a long way to selling the idea that the barrel is real. There should also be a sliver of shadow from the house on the very lower right edge of the barrel. Also looking at that lower edge, consider masking in some of the grass to overlap that edge.

These are all fairly little tweaks, but combined they would do a LOT to increase the believability of this setup. Looking forward to seeing more!

@jsbarrett Thanks for the critique and input on that little barrel test. For the lighting it was just one ambient light. For some reason lighting in Hitfilm is kind of boggling me compared to the way it is done in Blender so that contributed to the bad lighting in this test. This was more of a learning process on creating my own model in Blender start to finish and then export it with created UV maps and have them work in Hitfilm.

Now the elements I already have they are just on my old laptop and I am just super lazy cause I still have all my audio and video stuff on it. I just don't want to or keep forgetting to start the transfer of about 50 gigs worth of files to the new laptop.

As for the other projects I may get around to working on them again once I dig out the files. The drone footage one I am not even sure if I have all the files anymore. Main slowdown recently was due to HF not running on the old laptop and was even a bit sluggish on the desktop compared to how HF3 or 4 Pro ran. So I kind of just migrated into more Blending instead.

P.S. yeah the shadow was a big issue to me but it was just more a test I might tweak it some more just to have something to do while freezing to death in this cold Florida winter.

@FlyingBanana78&nbsp; FWIW, I keep most of my assets on external hard drives so I can swap them between computers easily. True, you have to stay anal about keeping files you're working on updated on the externals but it works for me. I have one for 3D models and such, one for videos and and family stuff, one for photos and music files and one that is dedicated to all the 8mm home movies that I had laser scanned frame by frame (that one rarely gets hooked up.)

@tddavis Yeah I should invest in an external for that reason, when I first started tinkering around with this type of stuff a couple years ago I never thought that I would fill a 1tb drive as quickly as it has. Even thought about digging out one of my ancient desktops and using it as a home server just for storage to be shared between the home laptops/desktops but I think the external would be a lot better just in case I am working on something away from home on the laptop. I could just bring the external drive with me and have all the files. Guess that will be my next purchase.

Well I figured I will just use this thread as a post all and this one was done a while back just using the day for night and a little additional grading along with the film jitter. Pretty interesting considering the sun was so bright and not a cloud in the sky that day. Looking back at it I should have carried the background ambiance longer (the whole way through to the end) but I believe that was the last project I was able to work on before Hitfilm no longer worked on this laptop.